Sybil (Wry) Coleman ’64

In the Scotlight

Sybil (Wry) Coleman ’64

Sybil Coleman was a three-sport varsity athlete at Gordon before Ruth Bader Ginsburg won her first gender discrimination case and before Title IX went into effect. In the ’60s, one in every 27 girls played a sport (now that ratio is two out of every five) and female college athletes received only two percent of overall athletic budgets. With limited resources, Coleman and her teammates had to line their own fields and find rides to and from their games. But none of this changed how Coleman felt about sports. She loved the thrill of full-court fast breaks, fielding balls and setting hitters up for a good spike—and that was reflected on the scoreboard. For two years in a row, the Women’s Basketball team never lost a game and the Volleyball team became league champions. After graduation, the Gordon community would come to know Coleman as a coach, women’s athletic director and, later, professor. She says that her years in Athletics served as a perfect forerunner to a 24-year-long career in social work (prior to becoming a professor). “As a student-athlete,” she says, “I learned I couldn’t maximize all values simultaneously. I was an athlete, a musician, a student, an employee. I had to figure out seasonally and even almost weekly where my attentions had to be. That was a wonderful lesson to carry into social work. There are times when working with families, you want to preserve the family, but you want to protect the child. At times, you can’t do both, so you do the least harmful thing, which is to take the child out of the home for their protection.”